Anecdotes about Alan Turing

4 Revealing Anecdotes about Alan Turing

01. Persecuted because Gay

Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of England, noted in a national apology, fifty years after Turing’s suicide, that Alan, the II World War hero, faced cruelpersecution for being gay, a fate shared by tens of thousands of others.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when such behaviour was still a criminal act in the UK. He accepted treatment with DES – chemical castration – as an alternative to prison.

A genius who was brave in the face of prejudice.

_____

02. Cracked Nazi’s Codes

During WWII, One of the greatest issues for England was made the Atlantic safe from the U-Boat menace. Turing was able to crack the nazi’s code, cipher the Fuhrer used to communicate with commanders in the field, allowing the Allies to know the plans of Hitler. It was one of the mile stones to the success of the D-Day.

_____

03. Imagined the Modern Computer

At first few people could appreciate the radical nature of his ideas. His Universal Turing Machine concept, a calculator performing multiple tasks by changing software. Quite every early model of computer owes a debt to Turing’s paper.

_____

04. Laid the basis for Artificial Intelligence

Turing constantly turned over the question of how to define this new intelligence he helped birth. In 1950, he wrote a paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” about the concept of “artificial intelligence”. He stated that for a computer truly to think, it must fool a human interrogator into thinking it’s another human during conversation.